It's a warm and sunny afternoon, and Walter Plywaski, 83, is settling into a rocking chair on the front porch of his North Boulder home, chain-smoking Pall Malls and watching through black fit-over sunglasses as his Labrador Retriever runs rampant through the neighbors' front yards.

"Widget, come!" he yells. "Bad dog!"

The 6-year-old Widget reluctantly trots back toward the house. Plywaski relaxes and re-lights his smoke.

"I've tried to quit," he says. "But I wind up thinking of nothing but cigarettes."

Short, sharp and sassy, Plywaski is a dead ringer for the elderly protagonist of Pixar's "Up," and his list of daily obligations pretty much ends after "smoke and walk dog."

It's a light schedule, he admits, but Plywaski, a Holocaust survivor, has more than earned his laid-back lifestyle.

He's lived in Colorado for over half a century, but his youth was spent mainly in Jewish ghettos and Nazi concentration camps. As a third-grader, he survived overcrowding, disease, starvation and death-camp deportation, hiding in an attic in Lodz, Poland, until heat and hunger forced him to surrender to the Nazis.

Soon, he would watch helplessly as his mother was dragged to an Auschwitz gas chamber, and his father fatally beaten by a camp commander.

By 1945, when a combination of cunning and good luck allowed him to escape the Dachau concentration camp and begin what would be a two-year journey to Ellis Island, Plywaski weighed 90 pounds and had lost nearly all of his friends and family members.

For the last 20 years, he's frequently given speeches at various schools and organizations, telling his story in honor of those who did not survive to tell theirs. He receives no compensation for these appearances.

"When I talk about it," Plywaski says, "it allows me to see the reality of what happened, which is awful. But it's not as awful as my imagination about it. Hopefully such things will not happen again, and I hope that people who hear how life can be, will feel better about their own lives."

Today, at Denver's Mizel Museum, Polish president Bronislaw Komorowski will award Plywaski's efforts with the Knight's Cross of Merit, "in recognition of outstanding services to the Polish-American community in disseminating historical awareness on Polish and Jewish fates in the occupied Poland."

It's one of the country's highest honors, but Plywaski isn't bragging about it.

"I am slightly confused why I'm receiving that medal," he said. "There are many other people more deserving, especially those who helped me survive. One Jew could not help another Jew, so there were six or seven Polish gentiles who helped me at risk of their lives."

Though Plywaski is quick to deflect credit for his survival, to say that he "beat the odds" cannot possibly do his story justice. He made it out of Auschwitz, where the average life expectancy was about two weeks.

Plywaski was slated to be a guinea pig for a heinous malaria treatment experiment, before two Polish nurses rescued him. If it hadn't been for a timely electrical shortage at Dachau, he never would have escaped the barbed-wire perimeter.

When the Holocaust finally ended, he was one of only about 10,000 survivors out of the more than 200,000 people from the original Lodz Ghetto.

"You do whatever you have to do," he says. "You dig up grassroots and eat the roots. Whatever you have to do."

He worked his way onto a New York-bound freighter in 1947, then was held at Ellis Island for six months until he was granted legal entry into the U.S. From there, he worked as a lumberjack, miller, television repairman and welder, bouncing from Philadelphia to Corvallis, Ore. to Burbank, Calif.

In 1958, he visited Denver for the first time, and he was instantly hooked.

"I came out of Stapleton Airport and saw the Continental Divide," he recalls. "I said, 'That's for me.'"

Colorado has treated him well, allowing him to work as an electronics engineer and marry his now ex-wife, with whom he raised three daughters. His home of 35 years was devoured by the Fourmile Fire, but he didn't complain.

"I have lost more before. It's almost like water off a duck's back when you compare it to the Holocaust," he told the Camera in 2010.

Plywaski now lives with Boulder accountant Margaret Poyton, 66, the mother of a woman with whom he used to work. Since the fire, she's had a front-row seat to countless hours of Plywaski's reminiscence.

"I think that when you live through such a horrifying experience, there are different ways to react to it," she says. "Instead of feeling sorry and being depressed, Walter took the attitude that he is not a survivor, but a victor. He is still here, and life is to be enjoyed.

Content with his smokes and the companionship of Widget, Plywaski has no plans to move anytime soon.

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